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In Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this article series we introduced a student project that I’m managing at the University of Southern California Center for Systems and Software Engineering. This article (Part 4) describes the results of our first semester’s effort. We are currently getting started again on enhancements with a new group of students for the Spring 2017 semester. USC’s location in downtown Los Angeles is at the epicenter of a lot of bad driving, so we’re attempting a “crowdsourced bad driver reporting system”.

Our system consists of a voice-activated “dashboard-cam” mobile app connected to a Mongo database in the cloud, via a Node JS REST API, and some Angular JS webpages to file, review and query bad driver reports. This technology stack for our web-app is sometimes referred to as MEAN stack (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node). We developed a native Android mobile app in Java, and a native iOS app in SWIFT. Following the Resilient Agile process, and using Enterprise Architect to model the project, we attempted to go from zero to a working system in about 12 weeks of class time, by having students develop use cases in parallel with each other. Previous articles in the series have presented snippets of the UML model but everybody knows that successful implementation is where the rubber meets the road. So this article will show you how far we got.

When the driver issues either the “Report Bad Driver” or “Emergency Alert” command, the mobile app triggers video upload and server-side creation of the Bad Driver Report or Emergency Alert Report, as appropriate . The server then sends an email to the driver’s posting account with a link to a new report that’s pre-populated with the video.

While submitting the report, the poster reviews the video, records the license plate number, and grabs a single video frame that most clearly captures the offending vehicle. The report is then made available for independent reviewers to evaluate. The system requires unanimous agreement from 3 independent reviewers that the report is accurate. Once this consensus has been achieved, the report is entered into a database that is queryable by insurance companies.

From a development standpoint, we were able to exploit parallelism among the students to complete this set of use cases (including defining requirements, UML design, and coding) in approximately 12 weeks of calendar time with 15 students each contributing 5 hours a week. This calculates out to 900 student-hours or 22.5 equivalent full-time work weeks. In other words, about half a person-year total effort.